Rhode Island man co-edited award-winning Fruitvale Station’

By Peter C.T. Elsworth

Sunday

Jul 28, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Michael Shawver signed up to co-edit the award-winning movie “Fruitvale Station,” which opened nationwide Friday, because he had worked with director Ryan Coogler while they were both graduate students...

Michael Shawver signed up to co-edit the award-winning movie “Fruitvale Station,” which opened nationwide Friday, because he had worked with director Ryan Coogler while they were both graduate students at the University of Southern California.

“I said yes before reading the script because I felt very comfortable working with Ryan,” said the North Providence native by phone from Los Angeles where he is working on another movie.

“Then I read it and was blown away,” he said.

The film is based on the true story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed on Dec. 31, 2008, at the Fruitvale subway station in Oakland, Calif., by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. Grant was unarmed when he was shot.

Described as “outstanding” by The Los Angeles Times, and “both sorrowful and suspenseful” by the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “Fruitvale Station” won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, where it debuted in January and was picked up by The Weinstein Co. It also won the award for Best First Film in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival in France in May.

It’s general release comes amid the national debate generated by the July 13 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 18-year-old black man in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2012.

“The similiarities are pretty obvious,” said Shawver, adding he had found the not guilty verdict “really, really tough.”

“On an emotional level, I was very, very upset by it,” he said, adding that the driving force behind “Fruitvale Station” was to show “the human being behind the statistic.”

“Fruitvale Station” is 27-year-old Coogler’s first feature-length film. “It was a very, very low budget movie,” said Shawver.

He said he and his co-editor Claudia Castello worked out of an apartment so small that he slept in a closet. “Nobody was working for the money,” he said. “We all felt it was an important story.”

“For three months we edited like mad people,” he said citing “seven days a week, 12-, 14-hour days to make the deadline for Sundance. We were editing up until five days before the deadline. It was a very tense, tough time.”

Shawver, 29, grew up in North Providence and said he always knew he would be involved in movies. He said he remembers his father picking up “Star Wars” videos and how he became entranced by “the story” and by being “transported to a different world.”

“I always had a passion for images and fell in love with that,” he said, adding that whenever I had a school report I asked to do a video. He said when he discovered he could edit movies on a computer, “I would go around and record anything and everything.”

He graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 2006 with a degree in communications and film media, worked odd jobs for a couple of years before heading west and enrolling in the famed film program at USC.

Shawver said “Fruitvale Station” had “zero buzz going into Sundance.”

“Once it premiered, people started talking,” he said. “I heard it more and more. It made working in a small room for months and months worth it.”

He added that he remembered hearing people cry during the first screening and how he was moved by “having something I did affect people.”

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